reading every book | bekahcubed

Disclaimer: The book I describe and rant about within this page was read during my endeavor to read every book in Eiseley library and while following along with Carrie’s Reading My Library project. However, the contents of this post are more a political/social rant than a book review. Just letting you know.

I’d never heard of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the UN in 1948) until I found a children’s version published in my local library. The book was entitled We are All Born Free: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Pictures.

I had relatively low expectations of the book. After all, it’s an ideological children’s book written by a committee (Amnesty International). That doesn’t exactly make for soaring prose or beautiful language. In fact, it usually means it’ll be boring as all get out and clunkier than your first car. And so it was.

But that wasn’t what bothered me. What bothered me was the ideology contained within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which I have now taken a look at, thanks to this book.)

We are all born free

I didn’t have a problem with statements 1 and 2, dumbed down for children as “We are all born free and equal. We all have our own thoughts and ideas. We should be treated in the same way. These rights belong to everybody, whatever our differences.” Okay.

So too, the third statement: “We all have the right to life, and to live in freedom and safety.”

The fourth statement, against slavery? Statement five against torture? Yep.

A right to equal protection under the law? Sure. I’ll allow habeas corpus for all. (Statements 6-11)

After this, the statements get a bit sketchier. A few I don’t mind (although I’m not sure they’re followed anywhere–even in the US). Equal rights for males and females. Right to your own property (and against seizure without good cause.) Right to believe whatever we’d like. Right to make up our own minds. Right to speak our minds. Right to peacefully assemble. Right to vote. Okay. I’ll grant these.

But right to a home? Right to enough money to live on? Right to medical care? Right to ART? Right to a job? Right to a vacation? Right to a good life? Right to a free education? Right to learn a career?

Are you serious? In my mind, these things aren’t RIGHTS–these things are things you earn. You work to own a home. You work to earn money. You work to get medical care. You enjoy art because you choose to and you pay for it. You take a vacation when and if your employer allows it–or you quit your job and live with the consequences. You pay for your own education. You choose to do whatever it takes to learn a career. These things aren’t rights. They’re privileges that are earned. Who comes up with this stuff?

We often excuse such blather as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because we’d love it if this Utopian society it describes existed. We’d love it if everyone had a free education, if everyone enjoyed the good life (Come to Nebraska–we are “The Good Life”), if everyone had access to art, if everyone had a roof over their heads and enough money to live on. We’d love it. We want that to happen. I want that to happen.

But just because something is desirable does not make it a right.

The noun right means something due to a person or community by law, tradition, or nature. If we are to modify the noun right with the adjective universal (which means of, relating to, or affecting the entire world or all within the world), then we must strike out the words “law” and “tradition”, since there is no universal law or tradition. We must define a universal right as something due to a person or community by nature (although I would argue that the modern “nature” is less appropriate than America’s founding father’s explanation of the source of inalienable rights: our Creator.)

In other words, universal rights are things that are due to people for the sole reason of their being people, regardless of who they are or what they do. Notice that term “due”? Universal rights are things that are owed to every person, regardless of their condition. They are the things that we all have a moral obligation to give to one another.

Most of these things listed as “rights” by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are nice things. Wouldn’t we all love to have a free education? Wouldn’t we all love to have a roof over our heads? Wouldn’t we all love to have a job? Wouldn’t we all love to have enough money to live on? Wouldn’t we all love a vacation? Sure. (At least, I would love to.)

But the question is, do I have a moral obligation to give everyone else in the world a free education? Do I have a moral obligation to give them a roof over their heads? Do I have a moral obligation to give them a job? Do I have a moral obligation to give them enough money to live on? Do I have a moral obligation to give them a vacation? If those things truly are universal rights, than I am morally obligated to do all those things for every other person.

But I’m not. I don’t have to give everyone else an education, a roof over their heads, a job, enough money to live on, or a vacation. Those aren’t universal rights–things owed to everyone for mere virtue of their existence.

Universal rights means that I have an obligation to not kill anyone else (they have a universal right to life). I have an obligation to treat others justly (they have a universal right to equal protection under the law and habeas corpus). I have an obligation to not enslave or torture others. I have an obligation to not steal others’ property. These are universal rights–things due to all people by nature.

The rest? Many are nice to have but not necessarily defensible from a natural or moral point of view. It’s nice to belong to a country–but do I have a moral obligation to give another belonging in a country? It’s nice to have a “good life”–but do I have a moral obligation to give you a “good life”? No, not really. (I might, however, have a moral obligation to not give you a bad life–or to not interfere with your pursuit of a good life.)

Others are not only indefensible from a natural or moral point of view, but are actually contrary to other, clearly defensible universal rights. If everyone has a right to a free education, who pays for it? If everyone has a right to a home, who provides it? If everyone has a right to enough money to live on, who gives them this money? If everyone has a right to medical care, who provides this care? These things are not free. They all have a cost, either in time or in money or both. If these are universal rights, that indicates that they are due to all people REGARDLESS of what they do or do not do. Which means that the only way to ensure that everyone gets what is “owed” to them under this definition of universal rights is to compel another person to give it to them either by laboring under compulsion (slavery) or by giving up their possessions under compulsion (a form of stealing). Yet, slavery and stealing are clearly recognized as violations of true universal human rights.

In the midst of feel-goods about free medical care and education and homes and jobs and money, we forget that for every privilege we wrongly define as a right, we take away another true right.

For the sake of preserving human rights, let’s let our list of rights be short–but strictly observed.

I’m still trecking (slowly) through my public library’s children’s picture books–mixing together my read every book goal with Carrie at Reading my Library‘s personal challenge.

Carrie is moving much more quickly than I–her last count had her at 558 picture books read (Wow!) and partway through the “B” section. In my defense, I don’t have any toddlers to read for–and I’m a full-time graduate student and teaching assistant.

My last trip to the library gave me a modge-podge of books. The library had only one title per author for most of the authors in this trip–and I could find no discernible theme in what I found, except of course, that the author’s last names all began with the letters A and L.

The Butter Man by Elizabeth Alalou

The Butter Man by Elizabeth Alalou and Ali Alalou (illustrated by Julie Klear Essakalli) has a story-inside-a-story narrative. The young narrator is impatiently waiting for the couscous her baba (father) is cooking to be done. When she complains that she’s starving, her father begins telling her the story of himself, as a young boy in Morocco during a drought, waiting for the butter man. He and his family were hungry. There was no butter to dip their bread in. What’s more, the pieces of bread grew smaller and smaller with each day. To keep her son’s mind off the hunger–and to make the bread last longer–baba‘s mother tells him to sit by the road each day and wait for the butter man, who perhaps might give him some butter for his bread. If he ate the bread too soon, he would not have any butter to dip in the bread should the butter man come. So he waits each day with each day’s portion of bread, until the hunger is unbearable and he eats it without butter. Until one day, when he sees a man coming down the road. It’s not the butter man, but it’s even better.

I enjoyed this book. It’s a bit more text-heavy than the picture books intended for toddlers–it’s probably more suitable for slightly older children. But the cross-cultural story is engaging. The authors subtly contrast the waiting the narrator experiences–waiting for dinner to be done–with the waiting her father experienced in Morocco during a famine. The book gently encourages children to be patient–and to be thankful for what they have–without ever once mentioning a “moral”.

Louella Mae, She’s Run Away!, written by Karen Beaumont Alarcon and illustrated by Rosanne Litzinger, tells the story of a great search underway for Louella Mae, who has apparently run away. The story is told in lilting rhyme, with one stanza per layout. What makes this book unique and special, though, is that the last word of each stanza is left out, only to be revealed in the next page–allowing the reader to try to guess where the family will next search for Louella Mae. For example, one rhyme is…

“Round up the horses!
Hitch up the team!
Hop in the buckboard
and look by the…”

The next layout fills in the missing word “stream.” I enjoyed guessing at what location will be search next, and had a delightful surprise when Louella Mae turned out to be–well I won’t tell you what she turned out to be. You’ll just have to read the book!

Ten Little Wishes: A Baby Animal Counting Book I recognize the value of counting books, but I generally tend to hate them. I find them simplistic and boring. I mean, how many times can you handle “Two Birds”, new layout “Three Ladybugs”, new layout “Four Caterpillars”. Ughh!

So I wasn’t too excited when I found a counting book amongst my latest library pile. But I was pleasantly surprised. Ten Little Wishes: A Baby Animal Counting Book by Andrea Alban Gosline is NOT your typical counting book. Ten Little Wishes has a family taking their new baby on a walk through the countryside, taking a look at all the baby animals about and saying a wish for the baby at each stop. The family meets a doe and her 1 little fawn, a couple of mares and their 2 little foals… Each layout introduces a number, an animal, and the correct names for the adult and baby version of each animal.

All of this is done in sweet rhyme–

Around the corner, what a surprise!
10 new puppies with sleepy eyes.
A litter for Mama to cuddle and tend,
born before my story ends.
May baby make some special friends.

This book is definitely a keeper!

As a sidenote, the illustrations done by Lisa Burnett Bossi add an additional dimension to this book. I enjoy them as illustrations alone, but I especially enjoyed that they portrayed the father holding baby in a sling and mom and daughter wearing dresses. It’s a bit fun to see a little old-fashioned-ness in such a new book!

Universal Rights?

AL (a potpourri of children’s books)